Email from a geneticist friend:

[Quoting me] “But doesn’t the I, the Me, that I mentioned earlier the self-awareness that we humans uniquely have doesn’t that make us special? Do tigers, toads, and ticks have an I ? Do they have a connection to the Creator? I don’t know. Perhaps they have a fuzzier one perhaps higher animals, at any rate, see through a glass as we do, but more darkly. “

[My friend comments] Francis Crick’s last paper was a brilliant piece of work that shed some light on this very question. …. Long story short, there is an organ called the claustrum that all mammals share. Very little is currently known about it, but it is like a sheath around the brain that is in contact with a number of parts of the nervous system. Disrupt it in lower organisms, such as mice, and they are very confused. VERY confused.

One might even say they had lost their sense of self…

[Derb] Does Boris, our family mutt, know that he exists? After 14 years of bonding with Boris, including several thousand miles of daily walkies, I can say pretty confidently: Yes, he knows.